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Re: Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing

by Anonymous Monk
on Mar 22, 2011 at 05:08 UTC ( [id://894703]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Putting Perl Back on Top in the Fields of Scientific and Financial Computing

A few points from my end.

1. Its not sufficient just to do good, we must look and speak about that good. I seriously think Python has some genuine advantage over Perl. It has good defaults and currently the best web frameworks in its class. People are building cool stuff in it and demonstrating it to the world. When something gets that sort of attention and real world business benefits are shown, its bound to get famous and adopted widely. We need a major revamp in our attitude towards a lot of things. Chromatic has done a lot of good job, and he deserves a lot appreciation for what he has achieved with Modern Perl.

2. Building something cool and showing it to the world is important. Every other day I see post on HN or reddit where there is some discussion on how some problem or a start up was done with Python. We need more of those. Blogs showing real life uses of Perl and their comparison over other languages. Once people are shown how many good things can be done with Perl, a lot of people will join the party.

3. New shiny stuff is important. Standards are important, People are a little afraid to try out Syntax plugins in production because 'not in core' basically means not standard(You may call that thing wrong, but it unfortunately works that way). Nobody wants to maintain a third party bolt on for as basic things like class and method syntax. Besides the boiler plate scares away a lot of people. All that needs to change. People need to be shown that all the Moose and Syntax plugin magic can be made to work from a out of the box installation, without module installation, configuration and worrying about plugin dependency and maintenance here. I am speaking about old school lessons of usability here. Syntax plugins and magic modules just need to felt like being used as a part of Perl, rather being perceived syntax modules.

3. Perl 6 needs to show up or remain silent. We can go on harping about various definitions of 'release ready' software. But for 99% of the world a 'release ready' software means a feature complete, stable and release with a good ecosystem of tools and libraries. Atleast if not frameworks and all the make up stuff. Basic things need to be ready. Writing blog posts and then the discussion descending to questions on Perl 6's readiness, followed by elaborate discussion on X number releases of incomplete buggy software being termed as release ready is embarrassing to say at the least.

4. Some make up and dressing up is needed for sites like Perlmonks and CPAN. For heavens sake we live in an era where people buy iPhones only for the gloss factor. Dumb web pages are good for gray beard system administrators but not for most part of the world. The way things are presented matters a lot.

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